5 Things You Can’t Control in the Pool (and What to Focus on Instead)

Are you spending your energy and focus on the right things in the water? Give your performance in training and competition a boost by investing your effort in the right areas.

Swimming is not enjoyable for the perfectionist control freak among us. (No judgement here: I’ve gots me some of those perfectionist tendencies streaming through my veins.)

We end misdirecting a lot of energy and effort on things that are, well….straight-up wasteful. Instead of spending more of our time on the things that actually impact our performance, we worry about how others will swim. Or that we aren’t perfectly motivated to train hard today. Or we obsess endlessly over the result.

Yes, swimming is a competitive endeavor, and we therefore tend to measure ourselves up against the swimmer in the next lane, but this shouldn’t be the primary thing we are focusing on when at the pool.

2. Equipment.

From the moment our dreams become high-performance we start leering over at the magical power of expensive gear, enthralled with the idea of being able to pay for a shortcut to faster swimming without the requisite hard work.

As a result, I’ve seen more than my fair share of swimmer who obsesses over precisely what kind of racing suit to buy…but this same swimmer is the athlete who makes half the workouts, doesn’t push themselves during the main set, and their diet looks like a five-alarm dumpster fire.

To a point equipment can help you, but it’s not something you should be relying on to help you swim faster. Similarly, you can’t control what equipment other swimmers are using, so comparing your racing suit or goggles or their fancy parka to yours is wasted focus and energy.

3. Luck.

Yup. Luck. It’s one of the things that athletes, coaches and even I don’t really discuss because there’s not really much of a point—it’s not something you can influence, and yet, it is still something that is going to play a role in how you swim.

You streamline into someone coming off the wall who just jumped into the water during warm-up and dislocate two of your fingers? That’s (bad) luck. (This is also a true story—my pinky finger is still crooked to this day.) Or your main competitor gets DQ’d in the morning heats.

The infuriating part about luck is obvious: by nature it is serendipitous and therefore impossible to rely on. And so you shouldn’t.

4. The results.

Yes, I know, it sucks to hear this. You can’t completely control the final outcome. What you can do is put yourself in the best possible position to influence it to as high degree as you can.

As Cate Campbell, the world record holder in the 100m freestyle and widely considered a shoe-in for gold in Rio, saw firsthand, there are no guarantees in swimming.

Perhaps the most agonizing part of the sport is when you do everything right, check all the boxes, focus on your own deal, and the race just isn’t there for you when you need it most. (I feel like we’ve all been that swimmer at least once.)

5. How others view us.

Hey, ya know what? People are going to talk. They are gonna gossip. They are gonna say dumb stuff.

People will have something to say when you have big goals, and they’ll have something to say when you don’t have big goals. Work hard at practice and somebody will say something (“Man, you are making the rest of us look bad”), and when you have a bad day at practice and somebody else will have something to contribute (“Buddy, keep it up—making us look gooood”).

The reality is this: we worry about how others perceive us. It’s natural. Getting up (in a bathing suit, no less) in front of hundreds or thousands of strangers and trying to bang out the swim of your life is terrifying. I get it.

But the more you worry about what others think, the less you will believe in yourself (science). The fear of negative evaluation and its effects are real (but at the end of the day, people don’t really care, even if they pretend like they do), so limit them by not getting consumed in what others might or might not think about you.

When you start trying to control what other people think you will find yourself infinitely frustrated and stressed.

Okay. Well. That was a fun list. Sorta-not really.

With all these things that can go wrong, what are we left to do but endlessly stress about them? Sounds about right. Which is odd, given that we know we can’t control them, and yet we worry and tense ourselves up anyway.

This is why you should set goals for yourself that are as controllable as possible. They shouldn’t be contingent on how other people perform: saying that you want to win gold at the Olympics is a fun goal, but it’s faint and imprecise. Better to outline a specific time (that you predict will win gold) and build a process and the performance necessary to achieve that standard.

These goals are out of sight: they are specific, measurable, and you can completely* control them.

*Except for when you can’t.

You get sick one week with a rugged bout of the flu and miss four days of training. Some kid jumps on your hand in the warm-up pool and sprains your fingers. You tweak your shoulder while bending over to pick something up. Your coach picks up and decides to go traveling for a year, shuttering the program. And so on.

So even process-oriented goals can run the risk of being rail-roaded by a sudden and unprovoked burst of life randomness. Woohoo!

Should we just give up on goals? If things are so left to chance, is there any sense in planning at all?

How you react to adversity.

Do you react poorly when things aren’t going your way in practice? Do you give up when a teammate passes you? Get frustrated with coach when the workout is harder than you expected or wanted?

Fun fact: those little blow-ups serve as a delightfully accurate predictor of how you are going to react when things really go south on you in competition.

Use the little moments of rage to mold yourself into a mentally tougher swimmer: view each of the little setbacks and piss-offs you experience today as practice.

What you do to be ready.

Thinking about your practice later today, are you going to show up on time, do the mobility/activation warm-up as laid out by your coach, and do so without having to be asked? On time? With a water bottle and post-workout snack ready to go?

For some swimmers, this is a ripe opportunity to ease up on their effort and focus. Are you going to do the workout as outlined even when coach isn’t watching? Are you going to still give a max effort even though Little Johnny three lanes over is taking all of the coaching staff’s attention?

Your level of compete in practice.

There’s a belief that some swimmers are destined to always be racers, while the rest are relegated to being simply great practice swimmers. I don’t agree with this.

Racing and competing at a high level is a skill, and not just one you should be working on when you are standing up on the block. This attitude should prevail through training as well.

The foundation of his program is built on the idea that his athletes should compete every day, all day. Every drill. Every wind sprint. Every film session. Practice, in Carroll’s eyes, is everything. And not just competing with the person across the ball—but themselves.

About Olivier Poirier-Leroy

Olivier Poirier-Leroy is a former national level swimmer and the author of the books YourSwimBook and Conquer the Pool. He writes all things high-performance swimming, and his articles were read over 3 million times last year. His work has appeared on USA Swimming, SwimSwam, STACK, NBC Universal, and more. He's also kinda tall and can be found on Twitter.